The real fight is for civil rights

16 March 2004 — 11:00pm

ASIO has "form" when it comes to the character assassination of Australian citizens, writes Jeff Sparrow.

In George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith endures prolonged torture before he learns to love Big Brother. Melbourne writer and humorist Tim Ferguson ("In defence of the top secret life of ASIO", on this page last Thursday) evidently needs no such inducements.

How else to explain Ferguson's extraordinary suggestion that ASIO should be applauded for doing "wicked things in the name of our security" because "we need people who will stop at nothing to protect us"?

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With Australian security forces enjoying unprecedented powers, it's hard to see the humour in a newspaper columnist urging spies to embrace "exploitation, blackmail or deceit".

After all, on these matters, our spooks have (as they say in law-enforcement circles) "form".

Files released under the so-called 30-year rule reveal ASIO employing Ferguson-style tactics against anti-Vietnam War activists rather than terrorists. Indeed, the agency seems to have considered the two more or less interchangeable.

When Jim Cairns, then a senior figure in the ALP, proposed that the Vietnam moratorium sit down (gasp!) for a few minutes in Bourke Street, ASIO shrieked: "Cairns' activities could lead, via civil, industrial and political unrest to the growth of elitism in every sphere, to the manipulation of people by demagogues, to the fascist cult of the personality, to the worship of force, and to the destruction of the democratic parliamentary system of government and its replacement by a form of collectivism... That way lies anarchy and, in due course, left-wing fascism."

The archives reveal ASIO gathering information on the movements, telephone calls and political views of just about anyone who opposed the war, and then adding its own anonymous assessments of their character, personality and habits.

A file on the early women's liberation movement in Melbourne classifies feminists as to whether they are "attractive", "Jewish-looking" or "trouble-makers"; while participants in an anarchist conference are rated "fat and unattractive", "half Maori and not very impressive" and so on.

What such scuttlebutt had to do with security remains anybody's guess, but ASIO certainly took it seriously. The dossier (ASIO and Special Branch) on Sydney anti-war personality Bob Gould alone runs to 8000 pages.

The file of one activist - now a prominent neo-conservative - contains scurrilous assessments of his political views, alcohol consumption and personal hygiene, and seems to have been consulted whenever he applied for government jobs.

There's a long record of people who found it impossible to obtain citizenship or employment because of references on dossiers they were never permitted to see.

These days, even former US defence secretary Robert McNamara considers Vietnam an immoral conflict. Why then did ASIO monitor people protesting against the war rather than those cheering it on?

To ask the question is to answer it. From its inception, ASIO saw its role as combating the left and comforting the right. A year after ASIO's formation, its then chief, Sir Charles Spry, began compiling lists of leftists (eventually numbering some 7000) for detention in army camps should war break out.

As late as the mid-'60s, ASIO controlled hundreds of informers within the moribund ranks of the Communist Party and its affiliates. At the same time, it ignored the most significant campaign of domestic terrorism in years, a wave of bombings conducted by right-wing Croatians.

In response to criticism, ASIO resorts to the traditional plea of the repeat offender: "I'm a changed man, yer honour!" It draws a line between the bad old days of eavesdropping on the New Housewives Association and the good new days of combating Osama bin Laden.

But there's reason to be sceptical.

Consider the more recent example of the Victoria Police's Operations Intelligence Unit. In 1997, leaks to The Age revealed the unit - the successor to the notorious Special Branch - to be out of control, with files on innocuous community bodies such as Pensioners for Peace and the Victorian Child Care Action Group. During the late-'80s and early-'90s, the unit's undercover operatives ran a breakfast radio show on 3CR, infiltrated Friends of the Earth and sabotaged the anti-nuclear Peace Fleet.

A subsequent Ombudsman's investigation pointed to lack of accountability, a culture of secrecy and a willingness to sacrifice legality for expediency - precisely the attributes Ferguson so admires in ASIO.

Today, September 11 provides a justification for each and every new assault on civil liberties. Isn't it time we said that this particular emperor has no clothes?

Of course Australian participation in illegal and immoral wars overseas increases the likelihood of terrorism at home. But notwithstanding Bali and notwithstanding Spain, more people die in this country from lighting strikes than al-Qaeda attacks - and we don't give the Bureau of Meteorology carte blanche to kick down our doors during storm season.

In many ways, the "war on terror" resembles precisely the kind of conflict Orwell imagined, a war that requires a victory not over the terrorists but ourselves.

Tim Ferguson seems to have already achieved a happy state of surrender. Many of the rest of us, however, still consider civil liberties worth defending.